Question

elementary statistics

Answer 1

What is Statistics?

Stats deals with data. For example: polls in elections use stats to guess who will win an election, Drug makers use stats to predict when side effects might happen, A sport uses stats to guess how a player will perform, You use stats to predict how much is going to be in your paycheck.

Topics included in stats are ones you might have studied before:

Descriptive stats: Mean, mode, median
Charts: Box plots, tables and graphs

Elementary Statistics: Topics

Elementary stat builds on these basics. Topics covered are:

• Descriptive Statistics. Describe data, like mean and interquartile range.
• Probability. The chance of something happening, like: winning an election; Finding a parking space; It raining on a certain day.
• Probability distributions. You’ll be studying data and graphs. Some you may be familiar with, like the normal distribution (the bell curve).
• Planning and analyzing experiments. Where you’ll be able to decide if results of studies are valid or not.
• Regression analysis and correlation coefficients. You’ll be working with graphs like scatter plots to fit data to equations. You’ll also find future trends.
• Tables. You’ll be using lots of these in elementary statistics, like the z-table and t-table. Tables tell you a lot about probabilities of data distributions.

How to Understand Elementary Statistics:

My favourite statistic, and one of the simplest ones, is that 50 percent of us are below average; it also works with 50 percent are above average. It makes sense if you think about it. An average is calculated according to a set of given data. The “average” is that middle point: The point where half of the data is above and half of the data is below. This phrase works for just about anything and makes for some alarming statistics, especially in newspaper reporting. For example:

• Schools failing! 50 percent of students are below average reading level.
• Fifty percent of cancer patients have below average outcomes